Mealie

Mealie is a free, self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping list, built with a FastAPI backend and a Vue frontend. The feature that sells it is a built-in scraper: paste a recipe URL and Mealie pulls the ingredients, steps, and photo into its own database, no copy-pasting required. It runs in a single Docker container, ships with automatic backups, and covers 35+ languages out of the box.

What is Mealie?

Most “recipe management” before Mealie meant a folder of browser bookmarks or a camera roll full of screenshots. Mealie treats a recipe collection like an actual database instead. Recipes come in one of two ways: paste a URL and the built-in scraper (using the same schema.org Recipe markup most cooking sites already publish) fills in ingredients, steps, and a photo automatically, or use the UI editor with Markdown support for family recipes that only exist on paper. From there, a weekly Meal Planner schedules what gets cooked, a Shopping List pulls straight from planned recipes and groups items by store section, and Cookbooks group recipes by whatever criteria makes sense: cuisine, occasion, or diet. Multi-user Groups let a household share the same library and meal plan, with an admin panel for managing sign-ups. An Open API and scheduled Webhooks round it out for anyone who wants to pipe today’s meal plan into another self-hosted tool.

How to install Mealie with Docker

1. Save the docker-compose.yml below in an empty folder.
2. Check the current release tag on the official GitHub repo and update the image line if a newer version is out.
3. Set a real timezone and, if the server is reachable from outside the LAN, a BASE_URL.
4. Run the compose file from that folder and open the mapped port to create the first admin account.

services:
  mealie:
    image: ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:v3.19.2
    container_name: mealie
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "9000:9000"
    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 1000M
    volumes:
      - mealie-data:/app/data/
    environment:
      ALLOW_SIGNUP: "false"
      PUID: 1000
      PGID: 1000
      TZ: America/Toronto
      BASE_URL: https://mealie.yourdomain.com

volumes:
  mealie-data:

docker compose up -d

Only port 9000 needs exposing on the container; the host side of that mapping can be changed to whatever’s free. Data, including the SQLite database, lives entirely in the mealie-data volume, per the official SQLite installation docs, which the Mealie team recommends for setups with 1-20 users. A separate PostgreSQL install path exists for larger groups or anyone running the data directory on network-attached storage, where SQLite’s file-locking can cause corruption.

Mealie and Home Assistant

Anyone already running Home Assistant can add Mealie as a native integration rather than a dashboard iframe: this week’s dinners show up on the HA calendar view, and recipe or shopping-list data becomes available to automations and scripts. It’s a small addition, but it’s the kind of glue that makes a homelab feel like one system instead of a pile of separate apps.

Mealie vs Tandoor Recipes

Tandoor Recipes is the closest comparison: also free, also self-hosted, also licensed under AGPL-3.0 (with a Commons Clause selling exception layered on top). Tandoor leans toward power users, with trigram-based fuzzy search, batch tag management, and AI-assisted features for recognizing recipe images or extracting nutrition facts. That power comes at the cost of setup time: Tandoor’s Django backend is built around PostgreSQL and usually ships as a multi-container stack (app, database, nginx), more moving parts than a first Docker project needs. Mealie stays to a single container with SQLite by default, trading some of that power-user tooling for a setup that’s closer to one docker-compose file and done.

	Mealie	Tandoor Recipes
Default deployment	Single container, SQLite	Multi-container (app + Postgres + nginx)
Recipe import	URL scraper (schema.org Recipe)	URL scraper, thousands of supported sites
Meal planner & shopping list	Yes, built-in	Yes, built-in
Home Assistant integration	Official	Not built-in
AI recipe/image recognition	No	Yes
License	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0 + Commons Clause

• Single Docker container with SQLite, no separate database to run
• URL-import scraper that just works for schema.org-marked recipe sites
• Official Home Assistant integration for meal plans and automations
• Automatic, template-based backups included

• No built-in nutrition or AI recognition tooling, unlike Tandoor
• SQLite default isn’t safe on network-attached storage, Postgres migration needed there
• Basic permission system; not designed to be exposed as a public-facing page

FAQ

Is Mealie free?

Yes, the self-hosted Mealie server is fully free and open source under AGPL-3.0, no paywalled features. A separate paid mobile app, Mealie.AI, exists in app stores from the same ecosystem, but it isn’t required to run or use the self-hosted server.

What port does Mealie use by default?

Port 9000 inside the container. The host-side port in a docker-compose file can be mapped to anything free, like 9925 or 9000 itself.

Does Mealie need Postgres?

No. SQLite is the default and recommended database for 1-20 users. PostgreSQL is a supported alternative mainly for larger groups or when the data volume sits on network-attached storage, where SQLite is prone to locking errors.

Is there an official Mealie mobile app?

The core project is a responsive web app that works fine on a phone browser. A separate, unofficial-adjacent app called Mealie.AI is listed on the App Store as an AI recipe assistant that pairs with a Mealie server, but it’s a distinct product from the open-source project itself.

Can Mealie import recipes automatically?

Yes. Paste a recipe URL and Mealie scrapes ingredients, instructions, and a photo from any site publishing standard schema.org Recipe markup, which covers most modern recipe blogs and publisher sites.

Mealie fits the same “own your data” logic as the rest of a homelab. Home Assistant can pull its meal plan straight onto a dashboard, and n8n can automate its backups or push shopping-list updates to a chat app, both covered in Mealie’s own community guides. Our homelab setup guide for beginners covers the Docker basics all of these depend on.